Malfunctions of Hungarian online auctions

The Hungarian equivalent of eBay is Vatera.hu, a site that has become extremely popular in the past couple of years. Before that, we thought that Hungarians were not that interested in online auctions and that is why eBay would not gain much presence here. But Vatera provided us wrong and has grown into a major portal. A more recent addition to this is Teszvesz which now seems to be owned by whoever owns Vatera.

Essentially, Vatera works as any other auction site: you list your item, people bid on it, then one of them wins and you ship the item to him by mail. Because online payments are still largely impossible in Hungary, people either pay on receipt (COD) or make a bank transfer before shipping. Of course, this is quite tedious and there are lots of potential problems. As a result, from the point of view of an occasional buyer like me, some sellers appear downright aggressive, trying to force you to pay before you even had a chance to check your email. You may get phone calls or just a series of mildly threatening emails when you check your email the next morning. Or even have a threat posted right there on the listing page before you bid. Needless to say, this turns me off completely and I just don't bid.

Then there are the problems with the postal system. First, they are ridiculously expensive. Indeed, it is hard to understand why it is sometimes more expensive to mail a book from one district of Budapest to the other than from Seattle to Houston. Why? And if you are the seller, you can be certain that you will have to wait in line at the post office for a long-long time before you can ship your item. But there are also problems with delivery. Since the postal system has somewhat of a reputation for losing non-registered packages, people prefer to register their mail. But then the postman has to deliver it in your hand and get your signature. This he often fails to do and instead drops a notice in your mailbox, saying that you were out when he came. This happens even if you don't leave your house at all because your home sick or just work from home. But now you will have to take the notice, go to the post office and stand in line with other losers like yourself. All this takes a lot of time and effort and often you have to go back at another time for whatever reason. You can train your local postman to actually do his job and hand your mail to you by a series of tips. But this is really paying twice for an already overpriced service, isn't it?

But let's get back to the auction site Vatera. It has one feature that is different from eBay. You have to make a mandatory review of the transaction, whether you want it or not. You may think that as a buyer your only obligation is paying for your purchase but no, you are actually forced to build their site by writing your review. If you do not, they will keep spamming you with email requests and eventually deny access to your account. So after a while you just sit down and get over with it. Yes, they win but then you think twice before making another purchase on their site. Who likes to be harassed?

And finally, in the past couple of weeks they may have done some "update" because the site simply freezes Internet Explorer. I am using IE8 so it is not the oldest version but Vatera consistently crashes all three of my machines. If I can remember this problem before clicking on a link in my inbox, I launch Firefox and the site works fine but I prefer to have a choice of using whatever I am generally using to surfe the Net and not have to keep switch browsers because their level of technical expertise is not up to their commercial ambitions.